Your typical Silicon Valley startup is run by a rarely washed teenager with borderline Asperger's Syndrome, who's never heard of profit but wants to sell for billions, right? That makes Blurb very atypical. Eileen Gittins, its chief executive, is female, for a start; and stylish.

She's also been through the whole web 1.0 boom and bust, where she first ran Personify, an e-commerce marketing and analytics company that grew to 120 people but wasn't profitable. She was then was on the board of Verb, which did contextual search. Gittins is evidence of the saying in American business: you don't get really smart until you've gone bust twice.

With Blurb, she's doing something smart: disintermediating a section of publishing (specifically, though she doesn't use the phrase, "coffee-table" - high-quality photographic - books) and making a physical product on which the company is certain to make a profit. It's a publishing company with nobody from mainstream publishing: "We're from Kodak, Apple, Google, Yahoo," Gittins says.

The idea for Blurb came in her time after Verb, when Gittins, a former Kodak executive, returned to her love of photography: she compiled a photographic essay about people in and around Silicon Valley. In 2003, she wanted to produce 40 copies as gifts. The quotes for publishing it were horrendous; not only that, but there was the huge delay in getting the printing scheduled. Which got her thinking. What if you created a company that would handle the printing using a print-on-demand model? You'd generate the book on your computer with some software, upload a file with all the relevant data, and it would be passed to the printing company, which could do a run of one, or 10, or 10,000. Later that year, Apple launched iPhoto, its photo organisation program - which also included a "design a photo book, get it printed by Kodak" element. Validated, Gittins saw a potential business.

Copyrights and wrongs

"I only had three questions about it," says Gittins. "One, could we make money on the printing? Two, was it just a niche of one - myself - who wanted this? And three, would I go to jail over copyright?"

The first two questions were easy. The third worried her: what if someone used a photo in a book that wasn't actually theirs to print? But lawyers assured her that as long as she followed "best practice" (such as having an ombudsman to rule in such cases, and witholding the file from further printing), the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) limited the damages to the "actual loss" (of reprint fees) to the copyright owner; no punitive damages, which is what terrifies any startup.

That done, she embarked on a tour of printing companies to find what file format they would need and how much they would charge for printing. "There's a lot of manual labour in traditional printing," she says. "But if you could create a standard file each and every time, then you could automate the pre-press process."

From that came a business model. All that was needed then was the software. Gittins and her team saw that they couldn't go for the usual software model, where the Windows version comes first and the Macintosh version much later (if ever). Blurb's customers, she saw, would be heavily on the Apple side, drawn from professional photographers or designers, who tend to use Macs. So the software - which took a year to write, including its e-commerce engine - is in cross-platform Java. Early expectations have been borne out: "about 30% to 35% of our users are on Apples," Gittins says.

But it's not the software or the printing that makes Blurb different. It's how it gets it to people. "The public has no idea how many books are printed," she says. The ones you see in shops are only the tip of the iceberg; hundreds or thousands more are printed and then pulped. With Blurb, books are only printed when someone clicks to buy them on the company's site: zero waste. And authors can keep updating the book by updating the file: "We have a woman in the US, an environmental architect, and we asked her why she used us for her book, and she said that it's because it's environmentally aware - we only print when there's a buyer; the turnaround time means she can update the book three or four times a month rather than having to wait 18 months for it to be printed; and the creative control it gives her. Plus there's zero financial risk." Gittins beams.

One can see all sorts of applications for an "instant" book: sports events, concerts, any sort of shared happening. A photographer covering the FA Cup, say, could produce a book that would be ready not long after the final whistle; fans filing out could pick up a ticket with a link to the book of the event, with the front cover showing the cup being hoisted.

She expected mainstream publishers wouldn't be friendly. "But they've had a front-row seat to what's happened in other industries like music and film. They're calling us." After all, a book need never go out of print with Blurb: it simply waits to be bought. If mainstream publishers adopted Blurb's file formats, they wouldn't have to worry about pulping unsold books. And by setting the price right, any sale is a profit - and Blurb offers Facebook, Bebo and blog widgets to let people sell their books directly. So far this year Blurb has printed 140,000 different books, with people putting an average markup of $10 (£6.50) on them. Revenues, she says, have exceeded their $30m target for this year, and the company has become "modestly profitable" in the past five months.

One can see huge vistas opening up for Blurb's model; where Lulu.com focuses on authors wanting to publish manuscripts, Gittins has focused much more on the high end, where quality matters. Even so, she says that "we're being driven [towards text-only books] by customers who want to publish those sorts of books."

But the clever thing is that it makes money every time someone clicks to buy a book. ("Lulu makes money when you sell your book. We make money on the printing," she says.) The focus on repeatability and cost means that there's presently only one printing site in Europe, in the Netherlands, although Gittins is investigating one for Prague. "The European side of the business has gone from 2.5% to 12.5%."

On copyright Gittins becomes animated. Google's announcement that it will digitise books in the US "is a win for both sides", she says. "If you're an author and you've done the work, you should get the reward; and it's a win for the technology side because it's making us think about new rules for protecting usage rights. I think this will drive that."

The only potential fly in the ointment as Blurb gets bigger and gets more users, is that some will be tempted to grab copyrighted material from the internet and try to profit from it. (EBay already sees similar problems: see Digital thieves swipe your photos - and profit from them, June 19 2008). "Yes, there will be more pressure to use copyright material because it's high quality," Gittins says.

Goodbye web 2.0

Meanwhile, she's watching the deflation of the web 2.0 bubble with detachment - because in the summer, despite "not really needing it" ("we aren't burning cash," she says) Blurb raised an extra $5m of venture capital, leaving it with more than $10m in the bank. Gittins's connections meant that when Sequoia Capital gave its now-famous "RIP Good Times" presentation to its venture-funded companies (Blurb isn't among them), "I had 14 copies of the Powerpoint in my inbox the same day. It's a small community."

She called an all-hands meeting just to reassure people that they wouldn't be firing anyone because of the crunch. "If they're not performing, well, of course that's a different matter," she says, and her steel shines through briefly. "What this really means is a chance to put daylight between ourselves and the competition." It certainly looks like a success story so far. Perhaps one day the story of Blurb will be a coffee-table book, available on Blurb's site - where, of course, it'll never go out of print.